Archive for July, 2002

For those who care, this site was down yesterday from about 20:00 Tuesday until 13:15 Wednesday. For once, this was not my fault! The powers that be on my server decided to make an upgrade to PHP but when they did something was not configured the same because my page didn’t work anymore. At any rate, they fixed it this morning, so we’re back up and running once more! Yay! Thanks to everyone who noticed and sent me word. I did the best I could, but from my end there’s only so much I could do. I put up a placeholder page and sent an email to the systems folks on the server, but that’s it. Apparently, there’s going to be some more changes made in the future so be prepared for more downtime as I roll with whatever they throw my way.

In other news, being on duty here at work really sucks. I got called this morning at 6:15 (which is only slightly more than two hours after I got to sleep) to go let some kids into their rooms that they had locked themselves out of. And it wasn’t just ONE lockout, no, it was THREE ROOMS IN A ROW! Go figure. At any rate, I came back home and I was just dropping off to sleep again when the crews who have been working on my building showed up and decided to converse loudly about the day directly outside my ground-floor window. Girr… I’m glad I have earplugs right next to my bed. I did eventually get back to sleep, and here I am now. *sigh* What a morning!

Today my goals are to pay my bills, survive a staff meeting, and get my car back from the shop. I’m getting the emergency brake and the horn repaired. Today is payday, but it’s already gone. It was spoken for weeks ago. *double-sigh* Maybe next month will be better with less surprises? Sorry, mom, I know I told you I’m going to try to pay you back this summer, but I’m doing the best I can. I haven’t forgotten!

Lastly, Kimi and Kelly gets back from wherever the heck she is on Saturday, so that should be groovy like that. Yay! We’re all very excited. Maybe Kimi will stick around this country for more then a year this time, eh? We’ll all be here in Eugene for about three weeks before those who have semester schools head out in late August. Party hard while we can! Chris out.

[Note (21:19)– I’ve done some work on the survey system. You should be able to go back to vote on old surveys now. Let me know if it’s broken. Also, Annie, CALL YOUR MOM! See comments for details.]

It’s that time again–laundry time. I’d leave campus to do laundry, but I have a lot and laundry takes time. I’m also on duty so I really should be here as much as I can. However, that doesn’t cancel out the fact that I’m rapidly running out of shirts to wear.

In some mildly-entertaining news, I’ve added another survey and a new ChrisCam shot. Summer rocks my world–I’m not looking forward to classes resuming in the fall. The work is good has been pretty good so far, however, it looks like things are going to get worse.

I’m also not looking forward to being assigned more conferences due to some summer staff members who are leaving. One I can understand somewhat; he’s National Guard so when he gets the call, he has to go, but the other person leaving (IMHO) has to do with poor management in the office. We are constantly assigned more tasks based simply on the fact that we’ll do them. This may sound simple and foolish, but it’s a problem if only some of the staff are pulling their weight. It’s like we’re being punished for being reliable, e.g. “Chris did all that stuff well, so let’s give him more to do!” This finally got to be too much for one staff member, and I wish this person the best. I blame management for the ensuing new work the rest of us will be unevenly distributed over the rest of the summer. We’re already short-staffed; we were originally supposed to have 16 CA’s for the summer, but we have been working with only 14 all summer; two people dropped out in the spring, but were never replaced. This has already made the work more intense then we signed up for, but now it’s only going to get worse when we get down to 12! This oversight from management has left us, the CA’s, vulnerable should any of us leave because we don’t have any slack in the staff, so when this DID happen, we get to try to pick up the slack. They say that “August is easier, so don’t complain about all the work in June/July!” BULLSHIT! We’ve got plenty coming up in August, and I can’t see any of our workload getting any less through the end of the summer months as compared to the beginning. We’ve still got all of the UO sports pre-season stuff coming up, plus some additional conferences that signed on during the summer, plus all the conferences that are going to get re-assigned from our soon-to-be-MIA staff members!

*Breathes* OK, I didn’t mean to go on a rant there. I could be wrong… Chris out.

Coolness! I just finished the first beta edition of my all-new survey system. I know that many of you have taken little web surveys from time to time, but mine’s better, and you know why? Cuz I wrote this one, that’s why! It’s (of course) totally database-driven, so I can add more surveys whenever I want and you’all can go back and review old ones. You’ll only be able to vote in the most-current one for the time being. I may change that sometime–we’ll see how it goes.

Take survey

View results

The first survey is a very basic one so I don’t scare anyone off with some weird ideas I may come up with. Oh, and needless to say, there’s gonna be some bugs, so leave a note if you notice anything wrong. Chris out.

OK, this is nuts. I posted a new rant last night after midnight, and by 16:00 this afternoon, I’ve already gotten 7 comments on it! I didn’t even say that much! I guess that was the problem and it left the world open for speculation. To stop a few rumors started in the most part by one Mr. Post: I do not have E Coli (my stomach is fine), nor do I have tintinitus (so is my hearing). When I say “don’t worry”, I mean just that and not the opposite. Sheesh!

In other news, it seems my comments page was down for a bit this afternoon for no good reason. The database was fine and the web page was unchanged. I tinkered with the page a bit (no real changes, I was still inserting some debug echo’s), but then my computer crashed. While it was restarting I hit the can. Then I watched TV for a bit. When I came back to check on it, the problem was solved. If only all of my computer glitches could be solved by the toilet and the television.

For the “older” folks out there (those born pre-1970), remember the Maxwell House commercial song “Popcorn”? Well, I’ve got a techno remix of it playing on mp3 right now on my computer. Isn’t it a more and more bizzare world we live in every day? Groovy stuff though. =)

Lessee, what else?… Oh yeah, I’m pimpin’ Kimi’s site again. Since I get so many comments here, I thought I might share the wealth a bit and send some good will her way. She’s way over on the other side of the world and she’s really like to hear from you all! Please leave her a whole lot of comments on her site, too! Chris out.

Well, I gotta write, damnit! My public demands it. There’s some stuff happening, but it shan’t be written of here, at least not right now. For those who know, I’m doin’ all right, so don’t worry.

Movin’ on, I’m again gettin’ the itch to do some more web development. I think I’ll add some kind of survey or something just to see if I can. Not sure what I’ll survey on, but since it’s primarily an exercise for me, as usual I don’t care if it’s terribly relevant. Hell, this entire site is hardly earth-shattering, so I can do whatever I want to!

Summer work has continued to be good. When we don’t have conferences in, we can basically just hang around and do this and that around the office whenever we want to. Translation: I can sleep in and drop by that office around 3pm to see if anyone needs me. At the staff meeting we “volunteer” to do whatever needs doing with the latest checkins/checkouts. SHIT! That reminds me–I’ve got a checkin tomorrow morning at 11am. *Sigh* Oh well. I guess I can’t stay awake until dawn tonight. Ideally, I should be asleep about now if I want 8 hours, but since I got up at 1:30pm today, I don’t think that’s terribly likely. In any event, I’ve had many spontaneous enjoyable evenings of hanging out with co-workers. We’ve listened to jazz, played video games, watched movies, explored the Walton basement, and practiced Ju-Jitsu. Good times!

I’ve received word that some of you are simply “skimming” the more technical bits of my news rants. SHAME ON YOU!! Don’t you want to learn of the wonders of web design? The perrils of PHP? The mysteries of MySQL? The peace of… *sigh*… nevermind. I guess I answered my own questions. Your loss, I say!

Oh, and a new ChrisCam shot has been taken. Simple caption. Take it however you want.

I guess that’s all for now. I was thinking of doing the web-survey thing tonight, but since I gotta get up in the morning, I’ll forgo that until some other time. Look for that in the future. Oh and question: where on the site should I put it where people will find and use it? Chris out.

Hey there, everyone. Just a quick note to mention that, on request of some residents of England, I’ve posted another ChrisCam shot. Nothin’ much, but it’s there. Oh, and since I haven’t pimped it in a while, check out Kimi’s site. Even if you don’t know her (she’s my little sister), go check it out and leave a comment. It’ll freak her out, which is also good. She’s in Europe somewhere right now.

If you thought the South Park thingy was fun, then check this out. I got the link from Wil Wheaton’s page on an old news rant of his. If you don’t know who Wil Wheaton is, then shame on you! Watch more Star Trek! If you haven’t seen his site yet, check it out; I found it very funny. Be sure to read the FAQ there if you go.

In other news, I had a cool time this evening hanging out with Megs, Dylan, Karen, Emily and Shelby. We shot pool for a bit at the Tortoise, and then we went for desserts at Sherry’s (sp?), which was also fun. It’s always fun hangin’ out with good friends like that.

Last night I went to a party at Marshal’s place to celebrate his 21st birthday. That was also fun, and for those who know Marshal, no, it wasn’t totally out of control and no, the cops did not pay us a visit! I didn’t even have anything to drink. It was cool hangin’ with Marshal and a lot of his friends. It was a lotta fun meetin’ new folks and hanging out. Happy birthday, dude!

First off, new ChrisCam shot for your enjoyment. It was created at some website that’s making the rounds. I adjusted it just a bit in Photoshop afterwards.

In other news…uhh… well, not much goin’ on. I finished watching Nadia last night at Megs’ with Carl, Josh, and Peter. An enjoyable show, and even though it’s made by Studio Gainax (of Evangelion fame), it’s actually a relatively happy show with a satisfying ending. It does, however, manage to lose track of the plot entirely for about 10 episodes in the middle, but they were fun so I don’t begrudge it too much. Good times, and thanks Megs’ for allowing us the use of your mad pad and for renting the last tape!

In other news I did my laundry last night. This may not sound like much, but it ties into another issue. You see, I had a lot of laundry to do because I was putting it off until after the “spider problem” was dealt with. The other day custodial came in with powerful anti-spider chemicals and now my problem is no more; that’s all that matters to me. This means I am back to my old sheets on my bed and all’s right with the world. Chris out.

Yes, once again I had to do some programming, so I decided to try my hand at “cookies”, which are both a nifty Internet thing and surprisingly easy to implement. There are two features on this site that now use cookies, one is the counter at the left there. It now sends a cookie to your browser and if it sees that cookie shortly thereafter, it won’t increment the counter. This is supposed to keep the counter from incrementing every time it loads, i.e. whenever you click on a menu item or otherwise flip pages around here. This cookie expires after an hour, so if you come back later, the counter will bump once more. Pretty cool, eh? The other cookie thing I do here is if you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a nice orange lable which says how many times you’ve been here since today, the 14th. Think of this as a private counter just for you. It also makes use of the expiring cookie that the other counter does so if you reload the page a bunch, the number won’t grow artifically huge. This counter/cookie does not expire, however, so as long as you don’t reinstall your OS/web-browser or delete all your cookies, this just-for-you counter will continue to grow. How cute is that? =)

In other news, my Spider War continues to rage on, however my spider sighting have lessened. I’d like to think that I’ve killed many of them, but it’s more likely that they’ve figured me out and are hence hiding and biding their time. I’ve put in a call to custodial, but since it’s the weekend, the soonest they’ll do anything is Monday. I’m hoping for some powerful chemicals or maybe a shrowded man in a black jumpsuit with spider-targeting Ninja swords. I can hope. Chris out.

I know I’m probably posting these things faster than you can read them, but bare with me. I got out of the shower today and on the back of my leg I found A SPIDER BITE!!! Of course you know, this means war. This is too much! I’ve gotten used to having the little bastards around, but when they start harming my person, that crosses the line! In living with these little hellions I’ve grown more comfortable with them, however not that we co-exist. No, it’s more that I don’t need a shoe or bat or something anymore, for now I WILL CRUSH THEM WITH MY BARE HANDS IF I HAVE TO!!! I DON’T CARE!!! THEY MUST DIE!!!!! ALL OF THEM!!!! It’s time to declare armageddon on my unwanted roommates! I’m calling custodial to send in a professional. Chris out.